Bit of a story but bear with me: The world of literacy has changed significantly in the past 20-25 years. I remember having a computer in the classroom in Year 1. We got to play on it only for a short time after finishing all our reading, writing and maths activities. It was always a game, I think it was about a Zoo and you would travel around feeding the animals, remember those colourful Apple monitors?! Year 2 again the same story but the game changed to Treehouse, this game was amazing, full of literacy and even music activities and games. I was so excited when mum and dad saved enough to buy one of the computers from school when the ‘new’ Windows ’98 was introduced, I sat at home playing the spelling and music game with my brother. We had 1 lesson a week learning how to use a computer, touch typing (with some success in year 5 and 6) and how to create and use emails (good old hotmail with quirky addresses). By the time my younger sisters were in school we had updated to the ’00’s Windows at home, Sesame Street had a literacy and numeracy game (I was too old for it by then, but) it had available as an extra demo a noun game. This is seriously the way I learnt about nouns, I was 13 years old and it was only this game that I finally understood what a noun was. Aaah the memories this brings back :D.
I was taught with pencil and paper, then pen and paper to read and write, to say my literacy was lacking is an understatement, I struggled and continue to battle through. My reading was and continues to be slow, I have learnt to skim but that like many other things was self-taught to survive and get through. Seriously it takes me as much time to type as it does to read a piece of information the same length. Literacy skills are not confined as they once were. Students need to be able to do more than take some information and regurgitate it. I have spent many lessons with students taking apart sentences, paragraphs and chapters to extract the key points of information and looking at different resources to form their own opinions. In the current literacy scope it is the student who is the critical thinker that will succeed, not the student who recalls what they learnt in class. The students who extract information from multiple modes and clearly articulate their understanding using many formats that will be successful.
Literacy is no longer reading and writing. It now involves reading, writing, listening, understanding as well as many other skills. We teach students how to look at and extract information as part of their literacy skills, we ask them to critically think and analyse the information before asking them to create. These skills of literacy are used to create effective learners and learners who will contribute to society in the future.